The Path Forward: Katharine Birbalsingh
Making Way For Katharine Birbalsingh
Katharine Birbalsingh is the headmistress of Michaela Community School, a free school in London that mostly serves lower-income students in Wembley Park. A committed educator of inner-city students and a self-fashioned “dragon lady,” she leads Michaela according to “traditional” teaching approaches, which has garnered a lot of suspicion from left-leaning critics and proponents of “progressive” pedagogy. Nevertheless, her popularity since establishing Michaela in 2014 has only grown, as evidenced by Michaela’s regular visitors and Birbalsingh’s growing number of public appearances since her (ostensibly infamous) speech at the UK’s Conservative Party Conference in 2010.
As in the case of Jordan Peterson, one’s perception of Birbalsingh will drastically depend on whether one learns about her from critical detractors or from her in her own words. The difference between these impressions could not be more striking. If one only hears from detractors, one gets the impression that Birbalsingh rules “Britain’s strictest school” like an authoritarian dictator, suppressing all channels of student spontaneity under the yoke of “rote learning,” silent corridors, and militaristic protocol.
If, however, one takes the time to listen to Birbalsingh in earnest, the impression radically changes. It becomes clear that while her educational approach emphasizes order, the authority of the teacher, and the importance of factual mastery, the experience at Michaela is not authoritarian, but productive, engaging, and rigorous. Furthermore, while her ideas are informed by her experience with the failures of modern “progressive” education, they merely attempt to assimilate the best of traditional educational values in a way that actually serves the needs of some of London’s more socioeconomically disadvantaged students.
I mention this discrepancy in perspective because it is worth pausing over as a characteristic sign of our times. We live in an era when the factional divisions of our politics have rendered many incapable of hearing ideas in a balanced and integrated way—when the slightest sign of a value complex foreign to one’s own often gets perceived in its most extreme form, rendering the possibility of dialogue increasingly difficult to sustain. This is particularly troubling, but not all that surprising, in the field of education, where many of society’s unresolved issues manifest themselves most poignantly, but upon which their resolution ultimately depends.
Nowhere is this “value overreaction” more apparent than in the strong resistance in much of progressive imagination to what Birbalsingh would call “small c” conservative values. For Birbalsingh, these values have to do with self-responsibility, duty, and the belief that there is a meaningful relationship between effort and reward. These enduring values, as we will see, form the core of her philosophy of education, yet when expounded they tend to constellate an extreme “anti-authoritarian” reaction, as if any application of hierarchy, authority, or values of self-responsibility implied authoritarian suppression.
Such a reaction does no one any good. There is much that is fine and noble in the progressive developments unfolding in our civilization, but they will ultimately hinder themselves if they cannot recognize opportunities to build coalitions with folks of the opposing “tribe,” and recognize the importance of conservative values in the attainment of the very ends they seek. It therefore behooves us to identify the real animating principles of figures who, like Birbalsingh, dare to challenge the status quo by conservative means, for such efforts not only help to render our perspective on issues more multi-dimensional, they help to evolve opposing perspectives into truer visions of the good.
Birbalsingh’s Philosophy of Education
As already mentioned, Birbalsingh’s philosophy of education proceeds from a set of “small c” conservative values: personal responsibility, duty, and hard work. At Michaela, this translates into a “no excuses” culture, where students are expected to take responsibility for their own learning, uphold high standards of conduct, and take the initiative required to create a better future for themselves. The rationale here is no different from that of Booker T. Washington or Thomas Sowell: namely, to equip disadvantaged children with the discipline, skills, and moral soulcraft to not only navigate a tough world, but to, as Birbalsingh puts it, “change their stars.” Hers is a classic vision of tough love for the sake of equality of opportunity.
It goes without saying that all high quality education assimilates at least some aspects of this vision. However, taken in broad strokes, it collides with much of “progressive” education in Britain and the United States, which takes on a “student-centric” approach that emphasizes self-exploration, group-work, and democratic classrooms where the teacher becomes a moving facilitator of learning, not a director at the front of the room. The idea that teachers should be authorities in the classroom is now controversial, because “authority means authoritarian.”
According to Birbalsingh, these practices simply are not that effective. While a proponent of more funding for public schools, she points out that even with more funding, results have been flatlining at a suboptimal level, suggesting that the ideas themselves are wrong.
Furthermore, Birbalsingh argues that a lot of the negative association surrounding traditional education largely arises from stressful experiences in progressive educational settings. Rote learning, for example, is not the unproductive method that many think it is when implemented early and consistently, nor is it ever the singular method used at Michaela. Birbalsingh argues that stressful and unproductive experiences with rote learning arise in progressive settings where students have not been compelled to master material consistently, incentivizing last-minute attempts by teachers to cram in material before major assessments. Thus the proper take-away from this scenario is not to do away with rote learning, but to incorporate it from day one so that students make steady progress and have the chance to analytically engage with material years prior to major assessments. Recent GCSE scores at Michaela seem to indicate that such an approach leads to better outcomes for most.
Birbalsingh’s vision also diverges from progressive education in its fundamental view on student needs. In opposition to the view that education aims to “draw out” the unique creativity of the individual (which she traces back to Rousseau), Birbalsingh argues that in order for students to achieve the freedom of real creativity, they have to know a lot, and that in order for them to know a lot, they have to undergo the (often less glamorous) work of mastering raw material in a systematic way. Discipline and mastery, in other words, are the preconditions for freedom, creativity, and self-possession.
Furthermore, Birbalsingh challenges the “child-centric” idea that students do not require established authority and ordered protocols in order to learn. Children, she argues, like routine and knowing what’s expected of them. They want the stability that comes with clear direction, leadership, and expertise, because they, being children, are not experts and in many cases are seeking a productive refuge from chaotic home environments. Therefore it is the duty of the teacher to “drive the bus” and make sure that students do not hop off along the way, for chaos at schools decreases student happiness, increases expulsion rates, and pulls everyone down by incentivizing survivalism in spaces where learning should come first.
The core of Birbalsingh’s vision comes down to a conception of happiness that, while old and enduring, challenges many prevailing assumptions. For Birbalsingh, happiness for students is a byproduct of learning, not self-esteem per se. Where progressive pedagogy often addresses student needs on the level of self-esteem, Michaela instructors focus first and foremost on their students’ learning because this is what cultivates a student’s confidence and actually helps self-esteem more effectively. If students feel the significance and capability of their own hard work, they will cultivate an enduring sense of self-worth—one grounded in felt power and the freedom that comes with mastery of a skill or field.
The implications of this view carry particular significance for the lower-income, and often minority, student populations that Michaela serves. Like Thomas Sowell, Birbalsingh counters the cultural tendency to explain most disparities as products of racist discrimination, deeming it a harmful thing to teach students who need to be shown a path forward for changing their stars. She argues that if racism is seen everywhere, it becomes impossible to deal with because it obfuscates personal responsibility and furnishes an ever-available excuse for all setbacks. While students should be educated on the realities of racism, they should also be taught lessons of self-reliance and personal responsibility, for it is these practices that will give them the discipline, gumption and fortitude to go out into the world and make something of themselves.
Moreover, in a culture where teachers stifle their authoritative position for fear of being called racist, and in consequence, cannot adequately meet the needs of their students, Birbalsingh’s philosophy of education also offers a welcome reprieve from the strictures of identity politics and reverse nationalism. As centers for civic learning, she argues that schools do their students a disservice when they emphasize what separates identity groups from one another while failing to show students their common national bonds. Granting the moral ambiguities of history, the persistence of real socioeconomic disparities, and the complexities of nationhood in the 21st century, how are we preparing our children to navigate such a world when we fail to cultivate the social bonds that will carry them forward together?